One-Time Use Key!

Published May 14, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Ummm, actually…

Bernard can’t unlock Abernathy’s file anymore, he already used the one-time use key. Whether he used that key to transfer the file to himself (and erase the source file), or to access it and read its contents — or both! — is unclear.

We don’t really know what he did with the file, but we have clues: Bernard’s malfunction has a time-limit, 72 hours after he diagnoses himself in the bunker with Charlotte he will has a fatal error. His initial head wound (when his “coolant” starts leaking) was in the barn after the Board was massacred (he was pushed down then bonked his head on a bucket).

Charlotte has plenty of reasons to be suspicious — at least there are plenty of clues she should have picked up on — that Bernard is a host. The showrunnners are keeping that ambiguous intentionally (for plausible deniability, I presume).

So it cannot be said definitively that the QA team knows B is a host and is running him through the aftermath of the massacre over and over again in order to jog his memory. If they WERE doing that, knowing he was a host, why not just perform a beach-side brain bulb-ectomy and get the facts from his recordings?

I think we are supposed to empathize with Bernard, as the hero of the show. He hasn’t caused any other being intentional harm. B has alliances on both sides of the war. He is ironically, the realization of Arnold’s dream as executed by Ford: a host that thinks it is a human, that humans can’t see is a host. He passes the Turing test better than any other host. Maybe BECAUSE Ford made him in Arnold’s image. And Ford allowed Bernard to continue Arnold & Ford’s work (a host making other hosts) in order to give the hosts agency in their own creation.

As the bridge between the humans and hosts, only Bernard can bring peace to the two sides and end the war. This is starting to sound like I’m saying he’s “The One” who will end the battle between men and machines (i.e., Neo…making Dolores both Trinity and Agent Smith in one body).

We have to feel like Bernard is in danger of being found out as a host for purposes of dramatic tension. It makes us invested in his survival. PREDICTION: Charlotte and the QA (Strand, et al.) are unlikeable characters that have to fail or die in the end. It will likely be at the moment they discover B is a host. Another host (Dolores or Maeve) will intervene and wipe them out before they can open his head up to extract his brain bulb.

The alternate Bernards theory is extremely compelling…especially in light of that short movie starting Jeffrey Wright (as multiple himselves) that HBO put out a few days ago. If there are many Bernard’s it means that: A) Bernard fixed himself by uploading into another body (one wearing the black outfit), or B) the many Bernards have no knowledge of one another, just as Teddy has no knowledge of a Teddy from a prior loop.

I’m not sure which to go with yet. Westworld is really good at leaving scenarios ambiguous.

Wrote all that before watching e02s04…

Thanks!
-Jeff S

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